I love Halloween. I love it so much that I have no problem proclaiming it my favorite holiday of the year. It’s kind of funny how this could even be possible considering I despise fall, I don’t care for much anything flavored pumpkin, and I don’t really get much enjoyment from scary pranks or costumes. I do, however, love coming up with fun costume ideas, planning Halloween parties for my family and for the library, and going to corn mazes. When I was younger it was a hell of a lot easier for me to get in the mood for…

You have to understand that I am a middle of the road kind of person when it comes to almost anything in my life. I think and decide, and then re-think and re-decide, and then kind of come up with an opinion and then I definitely make a decision. And then I re-think it again. I’m hardly ever sure that I am absolutely correct in a situation and more often than not that theory has been proven true. When I was a kid I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure stories and I would read them ad nauseam. Only…

My hubby is the best gift giver in the entire universe. Seriously. Sometimes I find myself moaning and groaning about the fact that he isn’t present in the moment (because he’s usually doing something annoying like working from home so that he can earn money to give people those gifts) but he always surprises me with home much he really is paying attention. Back in the Middle Ages when we were living together in sin (about one year pre-marriage vows) he gave me a super deluxe hair dryer for Valentine’s Day. I think I might have even got some super-fast…

Get caught up with the story : All Camped Out (Part One) and All Camped Out (Part Two) Now, I admit that I have never been the kind of person that ever looked twice at an RV. When I used to camp a lot with aunts and uncles back in the day, they had their small traveling houses but we were hardly ever let inside. It wasn’t until I was in middle school that my dad was able to scrape enough money to bring a little version home. And I do mean little—nothing like the behemoths that are on the road now. The…

Catch up with the story! Part one: Vacations Give the Loveliest Headaches Part two: Some Vacations Don’t Need an Airport The flight was delayed a total of almost two hours, which basically took away the cushion of time we were going to have for our layover in Seattle and no one was really smiling when we finally, FINALLY, took off from Denver. I was ready to just sit back and read a book, but I was reminded over and over and over again that sitting and reading wasn’t really an option for me with my very talky nine year old…

Catch up with the story! Part one: Vacations Give the Loveliest Headaches Hallelujah! The trip through security was much easier than I was anticipating and excitement started churning in my stomach. I have always loved coming to the airport, and knowing that my family was soon going to be flying on one of those beautiful machines had me all but jumping up and down in excitement. We get to our concourse and I suddenly realize that we’ve got about an hour and a half to kill and I’ve got a nine year old serial shopper with serious vacation savings in…

My parents loved to go on vacation without me. Okay, I don’t know if love is the right word, but I don’t think they particularly missed me very much. Back when there was still a gaggle of us rapscallions around, the road trip was THE thing to do during summer vacations. The time honored tradition of shoving everything we owned into a small vehicle that we would then spend hours upon hours in was important in our household (and it was a good way to shut us up about being bored and tired of playing outside all the time). I…

(A Daily Prompt exercise for Blogging 101-Assignment 11) Fair warning–this is an exercise for a blogging class and is not my usual fun stuff! Sitting and staring in silence for twenty minutes has not led my brain to remember a time or place that I might have first realized that I wasn’t going to live forever. I suspect it was a lot earlier than my memory gives me credit for and it probably came softly and inevitably at a time I wasn’t even thinking about it. I do remember once swimming in a cool mountain lake while camping with my family…

One way or another I was going to get to camp. Not the kind of camp that your mom and dad drop you off in the morning and then pick you up on the way back from work, but the real kind of camp—bunk beds, bonfires, and hanging out by the lake. I was convinced that I would have a way more awesome experience than Haley Mills had in The Parent Trap. Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neal wasted all of their fun camp time chasing boys in Little Darlings and I definitely wasn’t going to do that. I knew that…